PHP Cache Dynamic Pages To Speed Up Load Times

If your website receives a good amount of traffic every day and your web pages are loading slow, you might want to consider implementing some sort of caching mechanism on your website to speed up page loading time. Because as we all know that each client-server request consists of many queries, loops, calculations, database queries etc. these all add up to processing time, which eventually increases page loading time. The simplest way to avoid all these is to create cache files and store them in a separate directory, which can later be served as fast loading static pages instead of dynamically generated pages.

PHP Caching

There are several other PHP cache engines such as APC, Xcache or OPcache to boost your application performance, but they all work quite differently if you are curious; you can always find plenty of articles and tutorials written about them on the web. But here you’ll learn the simplest way of caching PHP pages, and that is using PHP’s core output Buffer and Filesystem, combining these two functions we can have a magnificent caching system..

PHP Output buffer :— It interestingly improves performance and decreases the amount of time it takes to download, because the output is not being sent to browser in pieces but the whole HTML page as one variable. The method is insanely simple take a look at the code below :

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<?phpob_start();// start the output buffer

/* the content */ob_get_contents(); gets the contents of the output buffer ob_end_flush();// Send the output and turn off output buffering?>

First line ob_start() turns the output buffering on, which means anything after this will be stored in the buffer and to retrive the contents of the output buffer we simply call ob_get_contents(). The ob_end_flush() at the end of the code turns buffering off.

PHP Filesystem :— is a also a part of the PHP core, which allow us to read and write the file system.

As you can see the first line of the code fopen() opens the file for writing, the mode ‘w’ places the file pointer at the beginning of the file and if file does not exist, it attempts to create one. Second line fwrite() writes the string to the opened file, and finally fclose() closes the successfully opened file at the beginning of the code.

Implementing PHP caching

Now you should be pretty clear about PHP output buffer and filesystem, we will use both methods to create our simple PHP caching system. Please have a look at the picture below, the flowchart gives you the basic idea of our cache system.
The cycle starts when a user requests the content, the script simply checks and outputs the cache copy of requested page, if it doesn’t a new copy is created and sent to the browser.

Below is the full example of PHP caching system, you can examine, copy it into your PHP project and play with code, it should work as expected. You can modify the cache expire time, cache file extension, ignored pages etc. to suit your needs.

if(!is_dir($cache_folder)){//create a new folder if we need tomkdir($cache_folder);}if(!$ignore){$fp=fopen($cache_file,'w');//open file for writingfwrite($fp,ob_get_contents());//write contents of the output buffer in Cache filefclose($fp);//Close file pointer}ob_end_flush();//Flush and turn off output buffering

Conclusion

I hope this script helps you create your own simple caching system, but you must avoid caching certain types of pages such as members area (after users log in), search pages or constantly updating pages, your users will experience undesirable outcomes. And remember just caching pages isn’t enough, consider combining and compressing JavaScripts, CSS to boost performance, even more, use various tricks and tips, dig deeper, use free tools like Google’s pageSpeed, Chrome DevTools to analyze performance of your website, good luck.

Thanks a lot Saran for this good article, such a nice explanation you gave. I’m sure this will help me a lot in reducing my site load time because website load time is what do or break your online presence especially when you are in a competitive market such as news, entertainment or sports for an instance.

I have tried to integrate your code in my site.it have some issue in that.my site have header.php,footer.php file in seperate ,so add code in both file as like your demo code.when i run site,it output the cache for footer section only.it not including header and content part in cache output.Is there any solution for this issue?

It seem to work only if you set the $cache_time below 24 hours (86400 sec.) or else it will create a new cache file because the code checks only at what time the existing cache file was created not the date…

Thanks a lot for this great cache script!
I visit your site often while there is a lot of interesting info for me.
After putting this script into a page and testing it, the loading time decreased from about 400ms to 60ms!!!!!

if i a have a dynamic page which fetches 5 records from database.
tomorrow someone adds the sixth record
and i again hit the same url will it show me 5 records or 6 records ?
what do you mean by this : if the Web developer manually edits the file

All that is required of you is to set an appropriate cache time. In my case, I will be modifying the code, I can use an unlimited cache time, since all my content is moderated, and I shall be coding a cache purge upon authorizing a change to the site. You may consider this technique for yourself, if it is a special interest to your situation, on top of a cache time, as well.

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Welcome to sanwebe.com, a blog 100% inspired by our ever changing web development world, it's a small effort to provide useful related resources, tips and tutorials to web developers and newbies. Blog was launched back in 2011, and recently been moved from saaraan to sanwebe.com, blog needs some catching up to do, but your valuable feedbacks will always help.